I joined the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War in order to honor my Union Army ancestor, my great-grandfather, Erastus Wayne Bennett (1842-1921), Private in Company C, 2nd Iowa Cavalry. He was the father of my maternal grandmother, Sarah Alice (Bennett) Montgomery. His Civil War diary has been a treasured document in our family ever since his death in 1921.

Erastus was born during the great westward migration across the United States, which began at the end of the eighteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. He was born July 12, 1842, in McHenry county, Illinois. His parents, Corydon and Eveline (Earl) Bennett, were farmers, as, I believe, were most if not all previous generations of my forebears. They had moved to Illinois from Wood County, Ohio in 1840, and in 1850 moved once again, when Erastus was eight years old, to Scott county, Iowa.

Erastus, along with his uncle, Cyrus Nehemiah Earl, enlisted in the Union Army for a term of three years on September 3, 1862, at Davenport, Iowa. Army records list his vital statistics as: age 20, grey eyes, brown hair, light complexion, height 5′ 8 1/2″, and occupation farmer. He was paid a bounty of $25. He was assigned to Company C, 2nd Iowa Cavalry, and on December 5, 1862, his unit, under the command of Colonel Edward Hatch, was engaged in the Battle of Coffeeville, Mississippi. They were part of a force that encountered stiff resistance near at Water Valley. The fight went on through December 6, and appears to have ended pretty much as a draw. Union losses were 10 killed, 63 wounded, and 43 captured, one of whom was Erastus Wayne Bennett. Six days later, on December 12, 1862, he was paroled by the Confederates, returned to Union control near Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was assigned to a camp for such parolees at Benton Barracks, near St. Louis. According to the Encyclopedia of the Civil War by Patricia Faust, “Lacking a means for dealing with large numbers of captured troops early in the war, the U.S. and Confederate governments relied on the traditional European systems of parole and exchange of prisoners. The terms called for prisoners to give their word not to take up arms against their captors until they were formally exchanged for an enemy captive of equal rank. Later, the alternative, confining captured enemy troops to prisoner of war camps, became policy.” Erastus reported to Benton Barracks on December 24, 1862, and spent his next eight months there, on parole.

In September, 1863, he was ordered to report back to the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, and he remained with his unit until August, 1864, when he was sent to hospital. He remained there, at Webster General Hospital, in Memphis, Tennessee, until May, 1865, when he rejoined his regiment. He was discharged from the army on June 17, 1865.

On January 1, 1867, he married Sarah Ellen Hoover in Durant, Cedar county, Iowa. Their marriage produced twelve offspring, eleven of whom reached adulthood, including my grandmother, Sarah Alice Bennett (1881-1972). Erastus Wayne Bennett lived to be almost eighty and enjoyed an excellent reputation in all the communities in which he and his family resided after the war. It must be said, however, that the Civil War extracted a terrible price on the health and well-being of my great-grandfather. Physically he suffered from lifelong ailments that he ascribed, in his application for a pension, to the exigencies of his military service: the effects of a horrible sunstroke on his health, rheumatism, neuralgia … and weak lungs. Mentally he displayed certain characteristics that today I believe might be described as Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD). Erastus was never able to ”settle down,” but kept uprooting his family and moving to new locations, where he would farm for a few years, then insist on moving again. In the forty years of their marriage Erastus and Sarah moved almost one dozen times. Finally, in the early years of the 20th century, Sarah had had enough. When Erastus announced that they were moving to Alberta, Canada, she was compelled – reluctantly – to obtain a divorce. Erastus never forgave her. After his death my great-grandmother discovered that he had taken steps to deny her any portion of his Civil War pension, which, at that time, amounted to $50 a month.

Their daughter, Rozella, wrote a letter to the pension authorities in Washington D.C., a copy of which is in his military file, pleading that her mother be allowed to receive a widow’s pension. It reads in part, ”I am grieved and hurt to know that she is just as deserving as any other soldier’s widow and yet she must, in her old age, still work. And yet we hold no grudge against him, for we know all he did was brought on him by that cursed war, for no better family could be found than the one who begat him.”

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous quote, ”War is hell,” comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the events of the 20th and 21st centuries. And learning about my great-grandfather and his problems after the Civil War only deepens my respect for him and my desire to honor his sacrifice. That conflict exacted a huge sacrifice from all those Boys in Blue, who answered their country’s call. Hundreds of thousands of them made the ultimate sacrifice – their lives – but even those who survived, like my great-grandfather, paid a heavy price. And so, for me, to belong to and support the SUVCW, is the least I can do to pay a final tribute to my great-grandfather, and to all our gallant forebears who proudly wore the Union Blue.

I also have in my possession a copy of my great-grandfather’s diary from the year 1864. This diary has been in our family since Erastus Wayne’s death in 1921. lt is an ordinary pocket variety, popular during the 19th century. It measures approximately 3 inches by 5 inches. The writing appears to have been in pencil. There is a note after the last entry of November 5, 1864, that says, “This book traced by Ida Briggs, third daughter of E. W. Bennett, during the month of June, 1938, at Wayne, Nebraska.” We owe this lady a debt of gratitude. I have no doubt that the contents of this diary are legible today, more than one hundred and fifty-five years after they were written, because Mrs. Ida Briggs took the time and effort to trace every word with pen and ink.

Despite flaws in spelling, punctuation and some undecipherable words, this diary is a precious artifact Erastus probably composed many of the entries at the end of the day, probably by candlelight. Hunger, fatigue and illness doubtless affected his way with words. Still, it is remarkable that a young man, a farmer, with limited schooling, would have had the dedication and will to record each day’s events so faithfully, especially when so much of his soldiering occurred out-of-doors, on horseback, in the rain and cold, or in the withering heat of a Tennessee summer.

Each day’s entry was limited by the size of his pocket diary and his observations, were, of necessity, short and to the point. There are no disquisitions on the nature of war or the moral ambiguities of the bloody conflict in which he and ”the boys” were engaged. Erastus never doubted that the Union was in the right. He followed attentively the progress of the other Federal armies, particularly those of Grant and Sherman, often remarking on good or bad news from the fronts. He obviously had a healthy respect for “Old Forest” – Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose prescription for victory was to “Git thar fustest with the mostest,” and who was rampaging through western Tennessee during most of 1864.

Every entry in his diary invariably describes two things: the state of his health and the weather. And what could be more natural? In the Civil War more soldiers died of disease than from wounds suffered in battle. Dysentery, pneumonia, infections and other problems caused by bad food and water, and the chronic lack of basic hygiene must have contributed to more than normal anxiety about his physical condition. His morale obviously suffered when he was unwell. Loneliness also affected him from time to time, especially when he was in hospital and separated from his beloved unit, Company C of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry.

He also confessed to feeling homesick and abandoned when letters from home are slow in coming. I know from my own experience in the military how important letters from home can be. Mail call was almost always the high point of my day. When a week went by without news from home I felt much the way my great-grandfather did when he wrote, “letter yet for me, I am beginning to feel lonesome. I believe that I am forgotton by all my friends if I ever had any.”

Erastus was not a great writer and his diary does not pretend to be a literary masterpiece. It is, however, a record of the day-to-day existence a typical Union soldier who could hardly wait until the war was over and he could “be in old Iowa again.” It enables us to gain a clearer picture of that not-so-distant time when our nation was forced to pause in its westward expansion in order to resolve the wrenching issue of slavery. The intensity of that struggle had a profound effect on all those who served in the military, and I know it damaged by great-grandfather both physically and emotionally. I would like his diary to serve as a tribute to him, and to all the other veterans of the Civil War. And we, as citizens of our great nation, have an obligation to keep the memories of those times alive.

A few words on the diary itself. As I stated earlier, the original copy in pencil had been traced in pen and ink by Erastus’ daughter Ida Briggs in 1938. I received a photographed copy of that original from my uncle, Dr. Al Montgomery, in 1996. I immediately set out to transcribe it into printed form, a project that took almost three months. I transcribed it exactly as was written. I did not correct any spelling errors or add any punctuation. Where words or phrases are garbled I have done my best to describe their intent. When I cannot make head nor tails of a word or phrase I have inserted a question mark.